(CBS) Each year, people lay out more than $40 billion on products designed to help them slim down. None of them seem to have being working very well.
Now along comes hoodia. Never heard of it? Soon it’ll have existence tripping off you’re tongue, because hoodia be a natural substance that literally takes your taste away.
It’s very diverse from diet stimulants like Ephedra and Phenfen that are now banned because of dangerous side effects. Hoodia doesn’t stimulate at all. Scientists say it fools the brain by making you think you’re full, even if you’ve eaten just a morsel. Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports.
“Hoodia, a plant that tricks the capacity by making the stomach feel full, has been in the diet of South Africa’s Bushmen for thousands of years.”
Because the Sole place in the world where hoodia grows wild be in the Kalahari Desert of South Africa.
Nigel Crawhall, a linguist and expounder, hired an experienced tracker titled Toppies Kruiper, a local aboriginal Bushman, to eschew find it. The Bushmen were featured in the movie “The Gods Must Be Crazy.”
Kruiper led 60 Minutes crews out into the desert. Stahl asked him if he ate hoodia. “I really same to eat them when the new rains be in possession of come,” says Kruiper, speaking owing to the interpreter. “Then they’re really quite delicious.”
When we located the machinery, Kruiper cut off a stalk that looked like a small spiky brine, and removed the sharp spines. inn the avail of science, Stahl eat it. She described the taste as “a little cucumbery in texture, but not bad.”
So how did it work? Stahl says she had no after effects - t one funny taste in her mouth, no queasy stomach, and no racing heart. She also wasn’t hungry all day, even when she would normally have a pang around mealtime. And, she also had no desire to eat or drink the entire day. “I’d have too say it did work,” says Stahl.
Although the West is just discovering hoodia, the Bushmen of the Kalahari be seized of been eating it concerning a surpassingly long time. hinder all, they have been living off the set up the body shore inn southern Africa for more than 100,000 years.
Some of the Bushmen, like Anna Swartz, still contemporary in old traditional huts, and prepare for the table so-called Bush food gathered from the desert the old-fashioned way.
The first scientific investigation of the plant was conducted at South Africa’s national laboratory. Because Bushmen were ko to eat hoodia, it was included in a ponder of indigenous foods.
“What they found was when they fed it too animals, the animals eat it and lost weight,” says Dr. Richard Dixey, who heads an English pharmaceutical company called Phytopharm that is trying to develop weight-loss products supported on hoodia depakote.
Was hoodia’s potential application as an appetite suppressant immediately obvious?
“No, it took them a long time. In fact, the original research be done in the mid 1960s,” says Dixey.
It took the South African national laboratory 30 years to isolate and identify the specific appetite-suppressing ingredient in hoodia. When they found it, they applied for a patent and licensed it to Phytopharm.
Phytopharm has spent greater degree of than $20 million so far on research, including clinical trials with obese volunteers that have yielded promising results. Subjects acknowledged hoodia ended up eating about 1,000 calories a sunlight less than those in the control group. too pretend that in perspective, the average dweller man consumes there 2,600 calories a day; a woman about 1,900.
“If you take this compound every day, your wish to eat goes down. And we’ve seen that very, very dramatically,” says Dixey.
But why do you exigency a patent for a plant? “The patent is on the application of the plant as a weight-loss material. And, of course, the active compounds within the introduce. It’s not on the plant itself,” says Dixey.
So no one else can use hoodia for weight loss? “As a weight-management consequence without infringing the patent, that’s correct,” says Dixey.
But what does that say about all these weight-loss products that claim to have hoodia in it? Trimspa says its X32 pills contain 75 mg of hoodia. The company is pushing it’s product with an ad campaign featuring Anna Nicole Smith, even though the FDA has notify Trimspa that it hasn’t demonstrated that the product is safe.
Some companies have even Euphemistic pre-owned the results of Phytopharm’s clinical tests to market their products.
“This is just straightforward theft. That’s what it is. People are embezzlement data, which they haven’t done, they’ve got no proper understanding of, and sticking on the bottle,” says Dixey. “Which time we have assayed these materials, they contain between 0.1 and 0.01 proportionality of the active ingredient claimed. But they exercise the term hoodia on the bottle, of course, so they — does nothing at all.”
But Dixey isn’t the only one who’s felt ripped off. The Bushmen first heard the announcement about the patent when Phytopharm put out a press release. Roger Chennells, a lawyer in South Africa who represents the Bushmen, who are also titled “the San,” was appalled.
“The San do not even understand about it,” says Chennells. “They had given the information that led directly toward the patent.”
The taking of traditional knowledge without compensation be called “bio-piracy.”
“You have said, and I’m going too quote you, ‘that the San felt as if someone had stolen the family silver,’” says Stahl to Chennells. “So what did you do?”
“I wouldn’t want to go into some of the details as to what kind of erudition were written or what kind of threats were made,” says Chennells. “We engaged them. They had done something wrong, and we wanted them to acknowledge it.”
Chennells was constant to help the Bushmen who, he says, have been exploited inasmuch as centuries. First they were pushed aside by black tribes. Then, when white colonists arrived, they whirr nearly annihilated.
“About the turn of the century, there were still hunting parties in Namibia and in South Africa that aloud farmers to go and kill Bushmen,” says Chennells. “It’s well registered.”
The Bushmen are still stigmatized inn South Africa, and plagued with high unemployment, little education, and lots of alcoholism. And now, it seemed they were about too be cut out of a potential windfall from hoodia. So Chennells threatened to follow up the national lab on there behalf.
“We know that if it was successful, many, many millions of dollars would be coming nearing the San,” says Chennells. “Many, many millions. They’ve talked down the market subsistence hundreds and hundreds of millions in America.”
In the supersede, a discharge was reached. The Bushmen will get a percentage of the profits — if there are profits. But that’s a monstrous if.
The future of hoodia be not yet a sure thing. The project hit a paramount snag last year. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which had teamed up with Phytopharm, and funded much of the delve into, dropped out when making a pill Uncovered of the active ingredient seemed beyond reach.
Dixey says it can be made synthetically: “We’ve made milligrams of it. But it’s very wasteful. It’s not possible to make it synthetically in what’s called a scaleable process. So we couldn’t make a metric ton of it or something that is the sort of quantity you’d requirement to actually start doing something about obesity in thousands of people.”
Phytopharm decided to market hoodia in its natural form, in diet shakes and bars. That meant it needed the hoodia plant itself.
But given the obesity epidemic in the United States, it became obvious that what be needed was a lot of hoodia - much more than was growing in the wild in the Kalahari. And so they came in the present state.
60 Minutes visited one of Phytopharm’s hoodia plantations in South Africa. They’ll need a lot of these plantations to meet the expected demand.
Agronomist Simon MacWilliam has a tall order: grow a billion portions a year of hoodia, within just a couple of years. He admitted that starting up the plantation has been quite a ultimatum.
“The problem is we’re dealing with a novel crop. It’s a plant we’ve take out of the wild and we’re starting to grow it,’ says MacWilliam. “So we have no involvement. So it’s different? diseases and pests which we have to deal with.”
How confident are they that they will be able to prosper enough? “We’re Same confident of that,” he says. “We’ve got an expansion information which is going to be 100s of acres. And we’ll be able - smart two meet the demand.
This could be huge, given the obeseness epidemic. Phytopharm says it’s about two announce marketing plans that will have meal-replacement hoodia products on supermarket shelves by 2008.
MacWilliam says these products are a slightly different species from the hoodia Stahl tasted in the Kalahari Desert. “It’s actually a lot more bitter than the plant that you tasted,” says MacWilliam.
The advantage is this species of hoodia will grow a division faster. But more bitter? How bad could it be? Stahl decided to find out. “Not good,” she says.
Phytopharm says that when its product gets to market, it Desire be certified safe and effective. They inn addition potential that it’ll taste religious.
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